Religion and the Family

Youth and the Gang Instinct

Geoffrey Hoyland

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367086565
• eBook ISBN: 9780429657351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The purpose of this book, first published in 1945, is to consider the problem of religion in its relation to the family. Even in 1945 there had been much talk regarding the break-up of family life and the weakening of parental control, and this book examines the role of religion in the social changes within the family unit.

Part One

CHAPTER 1

BRAINS: OLD AND NEW

Our enquiry as to the true place of the family gang in the social scheme will involve us in a number of short excursions into physiology, psychology, and history, and will lead us, in the end, into the Juvenile Courts. Let us begin with the physiology.

Modern research into the nature of the human brain has revealed it as resembling in some ways one of our typical old country mansions; it is a patch-work of many periods. Just as the mansion may have a Georgian front, a Victorian conservatory, seventeenth-century kitchens, and a mediaeval dungeon beneath, so our brains contain older and newer elements, the latter representing the additions to our equipment which Nature has provided during the long process of evolution. Nature has, rather remarkably, done her job along very much the same lines as the builders of the mansion, that is to say she has proceeded by addition rather than by demolition; when she has wanted to increase the capacity and scope of the brain she has done it by adding new material rather than by expanding and altering the old. The kitchens are still used as kitchens and the store-rooms as store-rooms—and, one may add, the antique dungeons still contain some grisly relics, often quite unknown to the polite inhabitants of the spacious modern drawing-rooms. Moreover, to carry the analogy still further, Nature has installed throughout the mansion a very complete and efficient telephone system linking all the rooms, old and new, together, and it is a system on which the wrong number is never given and the line is never engaged.

The ‘old brain’ in man bears a strong resemblance to the brains of the higher animals, such as the dog. It contains the centres which receive and correlate the messages received through the nervous system from without—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It also contains somewhere the centres from which proceed the instincts and emotions—anger, curiosity, love, desire, pleasure and fear. This is what we should expect, since we know that these instincts and emotions also exist in the dog. The old brain is itself a composite creation, containing newer and older elements, and it is so arranged throughout that the newer always controls the older—never vice versa.

The ‘new brain’ is confined to man and certain of the apes, and is of course much more fully developed in the former than in the latter. It has been super-imposed upon the older brain, enclosing it and much exceeding it in bulk, and the inter-communication system between the two has been most efficiently designed. It is the seat of all conscious intellectual processes and in particular of that mysterious element, unique to man, which we call self-consciousness; and true to her guiding principle Nature has subordinated the old brain to the new—the intellect has been put in control of the instincts and emotions.

We cannot say when, or by what process, these additions to our brain equipment were made, or whether they came about by slow and almost imperceptible degrees or by some process more analogous to the additions to the country mansion; but we shall, I think, be making a fairly safe guess if we suggest that the growth of the new brain went hand-in-hand with man’s growing mastery over his environment and that this mastery, in turn, was paralleled by his social organisation. Which of these was cause and which effect we cannot say, but we can assert with some confidence that our intellectual development has been due in no small degree to our social life. The ‘gang’ has had a good deal to do with the forging of our wits.

This physiological structure of the brain is in line with our own consciousness about the make-up of our own particular minds. We are aware that the thinking, talking, arguing, planning part of us is, as it were, ‘on the surface’, and that our instinctive and emotional life dwells on deeper levels. From these depths our instincts and emotions come bursting up into the daylight of our conscious minds, providing all the driving-power required for action and demanding insistently the directing control of our intellect. At times, of course, the demand of our emotions is so overwhelming that the intellect abdicates its control, as when we ‘see red’ or yield to some irresistible impulse. But always in these cases, when we have come to ourselves again, we recognise that our behaviour has been less than human; we have betrayed, in our abandonment of restraint, something which is an essential part of our nature as human beings—the old brain has taken charge of the new, and that is contrary to the provision of Nature.

Apart from these moments of abandonment we must also be aware, if we are honest with ourselves, that in very many cases when our instincts and emotions send up a demand to our conscious minds the control exercised by the latter is somewhat of a sham. This leads to the phenomenon which the psychologists call ‘rationalisation,’ when the conscious mind has to find some plausible reason for giving the emotions and instincts their head, even though the real reason is not sufficiently respectable to be admitted to the level of consciousness. The tail is really wagging the dog, but the dog, to satisfy his own self-consciousness and the demand of Nature that the new brain should control the old, has to kid himself that he is wagging the tail. Rationalisation of this kind plays a big part in the lives of most of us and is responsible for much of the folly, cruelty, and evil of mankind. We are jealous of a particular person because we feel inferior to him; we know that he is better at his job or in some respect of character than we are, so we hate him. But jealousy and hate of this kind are not respectable instincts—they do not pass the test of the moral censor which has his seat in our new brain—so our minds have to devise some other and more respectable reason for our instinctive dislike; we tell ourselves that we hate him because of his political opinions or religious views or because he wears a bow tie or went to the wrong school, or for any other of a dozen silly reasons. But honour—the honour of the new brain—is satisfied, and henceforth we can hate in peace.

It is when we come to consider the children that the importance of this distinction between the old brain and the new, between instinct and reason, becomes apparent. Children do not have to acquire those faculties which are associated with the old brain, they are endowed with them at birth, even if some of them do not show their presence till later; they do not have to learn to desire or fear or love, to cry for food and feel comfortable when they are filled, to turn instinctively away from strangers or to nestle happily into mother’s arms. These things are born in them and the equipment, though some of it may be latent, is complete. But they do have to learn the faculties associated with the new brain; they can only learn them through a long and sometimes painful apprenticeship, and all the materials out of which the new brain has to create its intellectual and co-ordinating functions have to reach it through the medium of the old brain, that is through sense impressions, instincts, and emotions. During childhood the old brain is the tutor of the new, the tail is continually wagging, the dog, until, bit by bit, the dog learns by experience to wag the tail.

The whole complicated process of education may be summed up as the process of teaching the new brain to attain the maximum possible degree of control over the old brain without doing violence to it For we have to face the fact that this strange duality between the old and the new does introduce an element of conflict into our essential nature, just as the juxtaposition of the Georgian façade and the Elizabethan kitchen introduces an element of conflict and restlessness into the aspect of the country mansion. This conflict between the old brain and the new, between instinct and reason, is both the bane and the glory of humanity; it is responsible for man’s noblest achievements and for his basest follies. And in this progressive development of the control of the new brain over the old, which I have defined as the essence of education, it is possible for the old to be damaged in such a way that a truly healthy and harmonious personality can never be achieved. The vital condition for health and true growth is that the communications between the old and the new should be kept alive, free, and uninterrupted. It is fatally easy for these communications to become weakened or even cut completely, and when that happens mental illness and social mal-adjustment are certain to follow. The normal provision of Nature is that instinct and emotion should have a free outlet into the upper region of the conscious mind, there to be dealt with by the fully integrated intellect, but sometimes the new brain, either from some outside suggestion or internal conflict, does not like the raw material it receives from below and solves the problem in the wrong way by cutting the communication wires and refusing to receive the messages. The instincts and emotions, thus denied their natural outlet, run amok in the deeper levels below the conscious mind and, besides causing suffering, weakness, and added conflict, often emerge in a disguised form as uncontrollable urges with which the intellectual faculties are powerless to cope. One more fact remains to be noted about children. Although elementary intellectual faculties make their appearance quite early on, and they soon learn to talk, think, and even argue, this appearance of mental activity is in some ways illusory—it does not mean that the new brain is in control in the sense in which the phrase is applicable to adults. Although it is pursuing a vigorous life of its own, full of creative fancy and experiment, the new brain is still under the tutelage of the old. Children run almost one hundred per cent on their instincts and emotions.

I am well aware that the foregoing is a somewhat bizarre and unscientific hotch-potch of physiology and psychology. The exact relationship between brain and mind is still one of the unsolved secrets of science; that there are molecular changes in the brain associated with thought is probable, but which is the cause and which the effect—which the tail and which the dog—is still a mystery. But there is certainly parallelism between the constitution of the brain and the make-up of the mind, and that is all that I wish to emphasise at the moment. At any rate I believe that the condusions I would draw from these considerations would meet with general assent from those who are experts in the sciences involved; they are as follows:—

1. Man’s instincts and emotions date from a very early period in his history, and were laid down, in their present form, before his fully-developed intellectual equipment was achieved.

2. These emotions and instincts have not been materially changed in character since the superaddition of the intellectual faculties. The conscious mind can control instinct and emotion, but it can neither create nor essentially modify them.

3. In young children the instincts and emotions are paramount. They take the lead in educating the developing intellect, and at any rate up to the age of puberty they are the main factor in the child’s life.

CHAPTER 2

THE PRIMITIVE FAMILY GANG

If the foregoing principles are admitted we are faced immediately with the necessity for our excursion back into history, for it is clear that if instinct and emotion play so important a part in the lives of the children we shall not understand them or their needs unless we get some idea of the conditions of life under which those instincts and emotions were forged. When you come across an unfamiliar and complicated machine the first question you ask, as you examine it, is “What was it made for?” and you will never understand an ancient building, such as a cathedral, unless you can discover what purposes were in the minds of the men who built it. The same principles applies exactly to the instinctive and emotional life of children—or of us adults for the matter of that. What was this equipment given us for?

The experts tell us that man, as a recognisable human being, not an animal, has existed on this planet for something between half-a-million and a million years. This huge period of time may be divided roughly into three sections of very unequal length, corresponding to three stages in his social—that is his ‘gang’—development. The third and latest of these stages—it is convenient for the moment to work backwards—is the stage we call civilisation, and we shall not be far wrong if we put it at something like seven or eight thousand years. It is, as its name implies, the period when man has lived in cities, or, more generally, in big communities such as towns and nations. It is the era of the large and highly complicated gang. We must remember, of course, that eight thousand years is, as far as our own ancestry is concerned, probably a gross over-statement; it is very unlikely that many of us in this country have a civilised streak in our ancestry going back for more than a couple of thousand years at most.

The next stage, still going backwards, we may call the agricultural and pastoral period, and it may extend for twenty or twenty-five thousand years back from the beginnings of civilisation. It represents the period when man had learned to till the soil and to domesticate animals as a source of food. These two activities did not, of course, necessarily go together and they resulted in very different ways of life. The primitive agriculturalists had to live in permanent settlements, while the herdsmen would be usually nomadic, wandering with their flocks over the prairies, tundras, and feeding-grounds in search of fresh pasturage. But we may bracket these activities together because in both cases man was relieved of the necessity of depending mainly on hunting for his sustenance. This is the age of what we may call, again very roughly, the village community. The primitive farmers tended to get together in small settlements for mutual support, and the nomadic herdsmen also frequently combined in groups of a similar size. As regards numbers and the complexity of group organisation we may call this the age of the ‘village gang.’

Beyond and behind this second agricultural and pastoral period there stretches the immense vista of the first, or hunting age, when man depended entirely for his food-supply on the pursuit of game. During the latter part of this period, when he had acquired considerable skill in devising effective long-range weapons such as the bow, he may have combined together in groups or tribes of some sort, in certain areas, but all through the earlier stages—and in many cases right to the end—he was unquestionably a solitary hunter. The reason for this is quite simple; before he had discovered long-range weapons or learned to fix a sharp nodule of flint or pointed stone to a wooden shaft to form an effective spear, man was compelled to get close to his quarry before he could kill or maim it, and large groups of people drive away the game. So, for many hundreds of thousands of years after their first appearance on this Earth, we must imagine our ancestors moving through the forests and prairies and swamps that covered the land surface of the globe in tiny, isolated groups, instinctively avoiding other groups in order that they might have an unrestricted field for their hunting. By far the greater part of this first primitive period is the age of the family gang.

The above is, of course, a very rough and inaccurate picture of the development of the human race, but for our purposes it is, I think, a valid one. For one thing we must remember that these periods were not sharply divided from one another, but existed—indeed still exist—simultaneously. The hunters lived on in many parts of the world all through the ‘agricultural’ age and both survived on through the period we call ‘civilisation.’

What about man’s brain throughout this long history? The growth of the ‘new brain’ with its intellectual faculties cannot at present be dated, but we can say with certainty that by the end of the first, or hunting, period man was fully endowed with his intellectual faculties and that all his larger social groupings are the product of ‘new brain’ activity. What is more important from the point of view of our present enquiry is the fact, of which there can be little doubt, that the old brain—with its content of instinct and emotion—is wholly the product of the earlier part of the primitive age: our—and our children’s—instincts and emotions come from the time when man was a solitary hunter, they were forged and laid down in their present form, complete to the last bolt and nut, when the only gang in existence was the family gang. All the immense developments of civilisation have been impotent to modify the essential nature of these instincts and emotions of a primitive age, though the activity of the new brain has been able to direct them into new channels. The ‘herd instinct’ that impels ninety thousand football fans to crowd the Wembley Stadium for a Cup Final is only the extension and adaptation of the instinct that drew the little forest group to huddle together at night in the shelter of their cave, or brought them crowding with excited cries of delight round the carcase of the newly-slain buck, and the contrary instinct that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II